Friday, February 17, 2017

Sweden's Fatuous Feminists: They're tigresses when confronting Trump, but meek in the face of real misogyny

So here's twenty-first-century Western feminism in a nutshell.
Earlier this month, after the White House released a photograph of
Donald Trump signing a presidential order in the presence of several
male appointees, Isabella Lovin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden,
put out a picture of herself signing a climate-change law in the company
of other top female officials. Plainly, the photo was meant as a
defiant statement of proud womanhood in the face of the world's leading
threat to female equality and dignity – the new man in the Oval Office.
Indeed, the current Swedish government, in which the cabinet consists of
twelve men and twelve women, has proclaimed itself to be “the world's
first feminist government.” Buzzfeed's article
about this triumphant moment carried the headline: “Did The Swedish
Government Just Epically Troll Donald Trump With This All-Woman Photo?”
But what a difference a couple of weeks can make. The other day a
four-man, eleven-woman Swedish delegation traveled to Tehran to ink a
trade deal with the mullahs. Throughout the visit, the women, led by
Trade Minister Ann Linde, wore hijabs, plus long, shapeless coats
obviously selected for maximum “modesty.” One photograph, which shows
the female members of the Swedish delegation striding past Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, is wonderfully illuminating: in their
postures, in their facial expressions, these women's defiance in
response to big, bad, evil Trump is nowhere in evidence. They're all
wearing dark pants. The woman whose face we can see the best is the very
picture of meekness and obeisance. The look on her face might well be
that of a humble, pious, provincial nun about to be introduced to the
Pope. Her right hand is on her chest, a signal that Rouhani need not
worry that she might try to shake his hand. Another picture shows Linde
herself clearly bowing to an Iranian official. The “world's first
feminist government,” which “epically troll[ed]” Trump, thus effectively
communicated to Iran – and the entire Muslim world – a message of
submission that could hardly have been improved upon. UN Watch quite
rightly dubbed it a “walk of shame.”
In Sweden, of course, every properly brought up man or woman knows
that it's virtuous to thumb your nose at the U.S. president and equally
virtuous to bow and scrape to terrorism-supporting imams. But a picture
says a thousand words, and the images of those female officials sporting
hijabs in Iran proved to be too much even for a lot of otherwise hardy
Swedish stomachs. The leader of the Liberal Party worried aloud that the
pictures would empower “conservative forces in our suburbs” (in other
words, religious Muslims). Linde offered the “excuse” that the hijabs
worn by her delegation were actually designed in Sweden. Get it? While
signing a trade deal, they were modeling Swedish products intended for
use by docile females! As Norway's document.no website commented:
“We see the contours of a new Swedish export success: Feminist
government facilitates the export of hijabs to Iran.” (By the way, it
turns out that when a female Norway official, Ingvil Smines
Tybring-Gjedde, was scheduled to visit Iran in December and was told
she'd have to wear a hijab, she refused – and canceled the trip.)
To an American reader, the insistently proclaimed feminism may seem –
to put it mildly – philosophically inconsistent with the deference
toward Iranian male leaders. But not to the Swedish mind. Let me
explain. As Swedish writer Chris Forsna wrote
in a recent article, Swedes have been inculcated for decades with the
idea that they “are more moral, feminist, and humanitarian than all
other nationalities” and that they can make the rest of the world good
by encouraging it to follow their example. In short, it's a twisted
version of a missionary mentality. The result: a country where retired
Swedes – who worked hard and paid preposterous tax rates to fund the
welfare state, assured they'd be taken care of in their old age – are
now being forced
to live in re-purposed shipping containers while newly arrived Muslim
families are handed the keys to sprawling houses. That's just one
example. Similar drastic cutbacks are occurring in health care,
education, policing, and other sectors in order to cover handouts to the
newcomers.
Crazy, no? But once you grasp the Swedish mind, the upside-down
priorities make total sense. Geriatric Swedes, in the minds of Stockholm
officials, must sacrifice to help change the world. As for Swedish Jews
who've been forced into exile by Muslim anti-Semitism – hey, they don't
need help: they're well-educated, well-off, and civilized, and
will therefore do just fine in Israel or the U.S. or Canada. The people
who really need help are the poor, illiterate, and (yes)
brutal and barbaric hordes from the Islamic world. How to transform them
into angels if you don't house, feed, and clothe them royally first?
Besides, what reward is there for a government functionary who simply
gives pensioners their due or provides Jews with the protection they
deserve? That's just a matter of doing one's job. Big deal! By contrast,
if you distribute lavish handouts to foreigners who haven't done a
thing to earn them, you're not just doing your job: you're demonstrating
your virtue and providing those foreigners with a splendid moral
lesson.
Of course, after all these years, it's clear to
everyone that the lesson Muslim freeloaders are learning isn't that
Swedes are virtuous but that they're world-class saps. It should also be
obvious to Swedes that all too many of the people they're helping have
nothing but the deepest contempt for their country, and that, unless all
this nonsense is stopped (and put into reverse) very dramatically and
very fast, they'll bring about its downfall.
But it's hard for
a true believer to give up on a religion. And I'm not talking about
Islam. I'm talking about that lethal faith known as Swedish
do-gooderism. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265825/swedens-fatuous-feminists-bruce-bawer